Bigfoot, Mysterious Men, and the Occult

Colin Bennett was a U.K.-based researcher of many-things-paranormal. He was someone who most assuredly thought outside of the box, which was definitely a good thing. He died in 2015 at the age of 74. As I mentioned my previous article on Josh Warren, the Men in Black, and the so-called “Thunderbird Photograph,” I have been digging out mountains of old interviews – some in Word, others in audio form. One of those audios is an interview I did with Colin on the MIB enigma. But, which spilled over into matters relative to Bigfoot, too.

On the issue of Gray Barker – who, along with Albert Bender, pretty much began the Men in Black mystery in the early 1950s – Colin said to me in October 2010: “Barker may indeed have written episodes of supposed UFO history himself just to keep the narrative going, or kick-start it when it lagged. But skeptics, foaming at the mouth, should be warned here that this is not witness to their claims of the falsehood of all ufological experience. Story-breeders may fulfill precisely the object of contact: not only will they tell the story, they will expand it, adding episodes of their own in order to try and initiate mythological change and development. Such mimetic game-play operates on the recognized principle that when we imagine we create a form of life.”

Colin expanded further on his thoughts on the nature of the Men in Black: “It appears fairly obvious to me that MIB are liminal manifestations as much as is Bigfoot. Like the UFO itself, the MIB and Bigfoot look like short media clips more than anything else. We can easily assume that any alien form may well have evolved into pure media, leaving behind mechanical traces perhaps millions of years ago. With such large animal cryptids as reported, there is no food swathe, no signs of nesting or breeding, no signs of tribal fights and – most important of all – no skeletal remains upon death, fatal injury, or illness.”

Colin had more to say: “The Man in Black differs, of course, from, say, Bigfoot, in that the Man in Black takes a humanoid form and has a limited language, and an equally limited presence. But similar to Bigfoot, our Man in Black has no social background. Every single one of these animal and human cryptids appears to be a limited simulation possessing a very short half-life, rather like a collection of discarded film-edits. We have, therefore, a detectable program at work here whose limitations are functions of its own psychological and dialectical resolution. The edits are the key to the program.”

Colin, who had his very own MIB encounter back in the early 1980s, in London, England, offers these words: “The quick exits and entrances of the MIB are a good defense, of course. In my case, our visitor made sure that I didn’t have time to form certain kinds of question whose answers might reveal the absence of true, live, human bio-complexity. I think he was reading me as my questions were forming in my head, and got out quick. We have to conclude, therefore, that our over-specialized, over-serious, predictable, and extremely limited Man in Black is capable only of producing very simple simulacra for a very short time.”

It’s notable that Colin had his own thoughts on the Albert Bender affair too: “Before marriage [Bender] was a rather typical back-bedroom young person of his time. His room was decorated with symbols of all kinds of occult weirdness, and it resembled a kind of metaphysical temple. He did not take notice of warnings of all classical occultists – Paracelsus, Levi, and Crowley – that mystical occultism is not to be taken lightly. History gives plenty of examples of forms which can be summoned up to tell all kinds of tales to gullible human beings, always anxious to have the secrets to life, the universe , and everything.”

Nick Redfern works full time as a writer, lecturer, and journalist. He writes about a wide range of unsolved mysteries, including Bigfoot, UFOs, the Loch Ness Monster, alien encounters, and government conspiracies. Nick has written 41 books, writes for Mysterious Universe and has appeared on numerous television shows on the The History Channel, National Geographic Channel and SyFy Channel.